“Basically we’re raiding the place,” he said matter-offactly. “We gather at the mansion, Rolf will corral us—that might take a little time, given the excitement. We haven’t raided in a while.” He grinned at me. “Anyway, then we’ll run to the barn together. At that point, it gets tricky, because if Vincent hears us, he’ll run and then it’s over.”
“So how do you keep him from hearing you?”
“We’ll send in our best trackers first to see if he’s there.”
“Who are the best trackers?”
He smiled again and I admired the flash of his white teeth. “Me,” he said. “And Julian. I taught him everything I know. So he’s good. Real good.” His smile widened and I could see the pride he had in his pack brother.
“So once team badass goes in, what then?”
He chuckled. “If he’s there, we corner him and call the rest of the pack in. Get the exits sealed and I’ll attack.”
My face dropped as fear overtook me. “Does it have to be you?” I whispered.
He glanced in my direction. “It’s been over three hundred years, Faith. He killed my sister, killed countless others—some I cared about and some who were just in his way. And he tried to kill you. Nobody else has as much riding on this kill. I have to be the one to finish this. Only then can I rid myself of him forever. Only then can I be at peace—or as close to peace as I can get.”
“Do you think you can beat him?”
I expected a cocky retort, something along the lines of “I can beat anyone” so I was surprised when he turned thoughtful. “I’ve fought him hundreds of times. Sometimes he’d come real close to killing me—luckily I was able to fend him off and run. But those times when I was the one about to do the killing . . .” He curled his lip as if disgusted. “Something always stopped me. I have no doubt in my mind that I have the ability to kill him. It’s just—”
“What?” I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t done it before now. He’d killed countless vampires without remorse and Vincent was so obviously evil. After everything he’d done—draining Lucas’s sister, murdering people, and trying to kill me and Lucas—how could Lucas have let him live? Vincent deserved death.
“He wasn’t always a vampire,” Lucas said softly. “I guess some part of me keeps hoping that he’ll, I don’t know ... change. Go back to being my best friend.” He laughed coldly. “But I know it won’t happen. He’ll just continue to become more and more evil. I have to kill him.” His eyes met mine, level and deadly. “I will kill him.”
But as sure as Lucas was about his fighting abilities, I knew there was still the chance that Vincent would get the upper hand. That Lucas might be the one to die that night and I would lose the only man I’d ever loved. That I would be alone. Again.
The full moon wasn’t due for close to three weeks, which, at first seemed like an eternity to wait. But time seemed to
slip away from me like water falling through cupped hands. I probably should have been worrying more about the coming raid, but strange as it sounds, I didn’t. The first two weeks were the happiest of my life.
We spent them much as we’d always spent time together, talking, laughing, teasing . . . only now there was the added bonus of kissing. We went to football games together, mostly so I could catch a glimpse of Derek, and—to keep my promise to Heather—we went to the movies with her and Pete, both of whom were annoyingly happy that I was dating someone. I even went to Lucas’s art show, which got me thinking about art as a major. Lucas and I would sometimes sit outside and sketch silly pictures of each other, mine always had big pouty lips and crazy hair, while I usually drew him with some sort of wolf part. I wasn’t the most amazing artist in the world, but when Lucas got me a new camera for my birthday, which happened to fall on the half-moon, I soon found that I made an excellent photographer.
I started snapping pictures of Lucas at random moments—mostly just to bug him. But then I started clicking all the time, loving the way the light hit his face in the morning, or the shadows his hand made over mine.
I’d taken a photography class in high school and always liked it, but never seriously considered it as an option. After going to Lucas’s art show and seeing his, and the other art majors’ work, I realized that he’d been right. Art was a good way to let out some tension. I still wasn’t sure if photography was for me, but I was having fun with it nonetheless.
Thanksgiving found Lucas and me sitting in Panda Express, sharing a cup of noodles and talking about my dorky high school days. I had been planning on going home to see my mom during Thanksgiving break, but as luck would have it, she had to go on a last-minute business trip for her firm. As much as I was dying to see her, she was on the verge of making partner and I knew missing this trip would cost her. So I didn’t make a big deal. It turned out to be fun, if a little unorthodox. Chinese food and a werewolf. Perfection.
Cross-country track tapered to an end during the same weeks as my final exams—all of which I passed, thankfully. Not having track to run off my steam left me with a lot of pent-up energy. Lucas had only come to a few of my practices, but when I confessed to him how much I missed it, he confessed a little truth of his own: he was a runner, too. Apparently, it was a werewolf thing. After much cajoling, I allowed Lucas to run with me in the afternoons, racing him on the abandoned track circling the soccer field. At first I’d rejected the idea since Lucas was so obviously faster than me, but it turned out to be great. It was another way we could connect and I loved it ... loved him.
But the happiness I’d experienced with Lucas during those first two weeks soon turned sour. As the moon waxed, so did my anxiety. The night began to frighten me again. Lucas and I began to snap at each other more often as the tension grew. We both knew that these last few days before the full moon might very well be the last we’d ever have together. Sometimes it made me so sad, I felt like my world was crumbling to ruins, and other times I just felt angry and cheated. I would lash out at my friends or at Lucas, and then my heart would break all over again, thinking of never seeing him again and having our final days destroyed by senseless fighting.
It was an odd, tumultuous time, and the night before the full moon was the worst. Our last night together. The weight on my chest was so heavy it felt as though it would cave in. We lay together on the couch in the darkness of Lucas’s room. We were both quiet. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, so much as uneasy. I think we could both sense how nervous the other was. Lucas’s eyes had been silver all night.
“Do you think he’ll be there?” I asked after a while.
My head was lying on Lucas’s bare chest, and I heard his sigh through his tan skin. “Hope so.”
“What happens if he’s not?”
“The pack will probably disperse. Without a set goal or a vampire in the vicinity to focus our aggression on, everyone will just go their own way. But Rolf will probably leave a couple scouts there just in case Vincent comes back.”
“And if he does?”
“Rolf will herd us all together again and we’ll go back.”
“He can do that?” I asked. “Make you listen, even when you’re all crazy?”
“He’s the pack master,” Lucas said simply. “Rolf can make us do pretty much whatever he wants.”
I was silent, trying to imagine what it was like for Lucas when he changed. Did he have any comprehension left? Any rational thinking? Or was it all madness and bloodlust? He must have had some kind of control if Rolf was able to order him around.
“How does he do it?” I asked. “Make you listen, I mean.”
Lucas stroked my hair as he pondered my question. The sensation of his fingers brushing my neck made my heart flutter. “Well, when I change it’s like the world turns red, in a way. I have very little control over my actions, no self-restraint. If something triggers me, I don’t have any chance to press it back. The beast just takes over and that’s it. Whatever I’ve targeted is dead. Usually.”
“But Rolf can make you liste
n.”
He nodded. “It’s like a voice in my head that overrides everything else. He can only give us simple instructions, mind you. Run. Attack. Come. But that’s all he needs. When we hear his voice, we obey.”
“But doesn’t that feel, I don’t know ... intrusive? That he’s in your head?”
“Well, it’s not ideal,” Lucas said. “But it’s the only way the pack can have some semblance of organization on the full moon. It’s how we get things done, like the raid tomorrow night. If we didn’t have Rolf to corral us, we’d all scatter.”
“And if I were to talk to you when you were transformed?” I heard the hesitancy in my voice. I knew he didn’t like to think about me being anywhere near him on the full moon. He usually never even entertained the thought. But I was curious. “Would you understand me?”
“Yes,” he said. His tone was curt, but he went on anyway, maybe because he now thought it might be possible that I’d meet him on the full moon—if things went badly tomorrow night. “I understand what humans say, I can hear them begging me to stop ... trying to make me recognize them. Sometimes it gets through, sometimes it doesn’t. Vampires always seem to get through to me, probably because they’re supernatural, too. Like we run on the same wavelength. But most of the time I’m too crazy to know what I’m doing.”
I flinched, thinking how frustrating it must be to lose your mind, and how terrifying. If it were me, I would worry constantly about killing innocent people or doing something else truly horrible and being unable to stop myself.
“Do you remember anything afterward?”
Lucas passed his hand over his face, groaning. “You have a lot of questions tonight,” he grumbled.
“I’m curious. You never let us talk about this stuff. I’m taking advantage, while I have you at a weak moment.”
“I’m never weak,” Lucas said stonily.
I decided not to dignify that with a response. Instead, I cuddled into his burning skin, hoping his warmth would stay with me when he left tomorrow.
“So do you remember?” I asked.
His voice was very different when he spoke next. Somber. Haunted. “Yes. I remember everything.”
I was silent, then, rolling everything over in my thoughts. Absently, I watched Lucas’s chest rise and fall in the white light streaming in from the window. I ran my hand down his arm, marveling at how smooth his skin was, when I felt a rough spot—the small scar on his forearm I’d noticed when we’d eaten lunch together all those months ago. I smiled to myself, remembering how I’d thought the scar was from his accident at the high school. I’d known then that Lucas hadn’t been entirely truthful about what had happened when he fell off the roof of the gym, but I’d been too nervous to press him about it.
“Lucas, what really happened on the roof last year? When you fell?”
“Do you have to know everything?” he asked wearily.
“Yes.” What a stupid question.
“What happened up there doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I said. “I don’t like that you lied to me.”
“Technically, I didn’t lie . . . sort of.”
I sat up and folded my arms across my chest, looking down at him. “I find it hard to believe that you tripped. You, the agile werewolf.”
He grinned at that and ran a hand through his hair. He seemed to know my stubborn streak was kicking in and I wasn’t about to drop this. “You’re not gonna like it,” he warned.
I shrugged. I didn’t like a lot of what he told me, but that never stopped me from wanting to know more.
“Remember how I told you I don’t date werewolves?”
I nodded and resumed my place, nestled into his side. I put my hand on Lucas’s flat stomach, feeling its swells and dips as I listened to him.
“Well, that wasn’t always the case,” he said. “When I was younger I used to date. Most of the girls died out over the years, but there’s still one alive that I know of. My most recent girlfriend.”
My heart was growing colder and colder with each moment. Part of me—the jealous part—hated hearing this and wanted to tell him to forget it, but another more self-destructive part wanted to know everything. I swallowed, hoping to keep my voice even when I spoke. “What does that have to do with why you fell off a roof last year?” I tried to make it sound like hearing about his ex-girlfriend was no big deal.
“We used to live together,” he said. “At the mansion in Gould.”
“Wait—so you’ve lived in Fort Collins before?”
“Yeah. I needed a large pack, and Rolf’s is one of the biggest in the U.S.”
“Why would you need a big pack?” I asked.
“I needed to escape Vincent. We’d just had one of our rows up in Ontario, and I was on the losing end. I needed time to rethink my strategy. A bigger pack meant more protection, so I came here.”
“I see. So you came to Fort Collins and met ... what was her name?”
I looked up and saw Lucas’s brown eyes grow distant for a moment and then he said softly, “Danielle.”
Somehow just hearing her name pass through his lips sent a slither of jealousy through my heart. I didn’t even want to think about all the hot werewolf sex they’d had—the sex Lucas and I would never get to have. “So what happened?”
“It was a while back,” he said. “Her dad was the old pack master and had just died. Rolf took over as the new leader, and everything was kind of a mess. Since she was the ex-pack master’s daughter, she had to deal with the politics of changing pack masters. There was a lot of fighting. A lot of bloodshed.”
“Why?”
“When one pack master takes over another, he replaces the Council as well—the people he relies on to make decisions. When those people don’t want to give up their power, it gets ugly.”
I grimaced, imagining, but tried to appear composed. “Go on.”
“Well, being her boyfriend, I had to defend her. I got into a lot of fights. It went on for years and I was tired of it. I was trying to lay low. Vincent was in the area.” He puffed out an unemotional laugh. “It was a lot like it is now, actually. Only, back then I didn’t mind dumping her to be free of everything.”
I frowned up at him.
“Don’t look at me that way. I almost got my head chewed off once a month for over two years. Literally. It was exhausting and back then I thought no woman in the world was worth dying for.” His eyes grew soft at that last statement and a small smile tugged at his lips.
“So you broke up with her,” I said.
He nodded. “And left Colorado for Russia. Vincent was close by, so I needed to ditch soon anyhow. Danielle was really pissed when I left, but she never came after me. Had too much to deal with here. The next time I came to Fort Collins was a few years back, like I told you. I was friendly with Rolf and convinced him to ‘adopt’ me. I tried living normally as a human, and for a while it worked. The only problem was that Danielle was still here. She’d fallen out of grace with Rolf and the Council and was living in a hovel of disgraced pack members out in the woods. She found me about a year after I came here and started stalking me.”
My face betrayed my shock. “That’s so creepy.”
“Tell me about it. I managed to keep going like I didn’t notice, but eventually she got so obvious that I felt I had to say something. I told her off, tried to get her to leave me alone. But she’d gone crazy living in the wild. We fought every full moon for months, but once she realized she couldn’t beat me, she took on a different tactic. She found me at the high school. On the roof where I was drawing.” He fixed me with a meaningful stare, one that said I wasn’t lying completely. “Danielle attacked. I fought back. I got the advantage and went in for the kill. Except I couldn’t. I had loved her once. And beyond that, she was a werewolf, and killing my own kind.... Well, that’s not cool in my book. So I hurt her bad enough to prove my point—that I didn’t love her anymore and I wanted her out of my life—and told her to go someplace else.” He pa
ssed his hand over the back of his neck. “And for all I know, she did it. I haven’t seen her since.”
I stared, overwhelmed with the story. “But that still doesn’t explain how you fell.”
He cracked a wry smile. “Oh, yeah. Well, she wasn’t too happy about what I said and I guess her pride was wounded at being beaten by me. Again. So she caught me while I wasn’t ready and pushed me off the roof. I think she wanted to hurt me because of how we’d left things. It did hurt like hell.” He rubbed his back as if remembering the pain and then shrugged. “Or maybe she just wanted to cause me trouble. I don’t know. Like I said, she was crazy.” He looked at me with a cautious glint in his deep brown eyes. “You pissed?”
“No, just surprised I guess. I never knew you had so many vendettas hanging around from your past.”
“Yeah, well that’s why I don’t date werewolves anymore. Too much drama.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “So what we’re going through isn’t drama?”
Lucas wrapped his arms around me. “This is different.”
I snuggled closer, inhaling the stubbly skin at his throat. “How? You dumped the last girl who got too troublesome. What makes this any different?”
“The difference is that if you died, it would be the end of me.”
My heart swelled, but I teased him anyway. “So really, saving me from Vincent is for your benefit.”
He kissed the top of my head. His voice was soft in my ear, his warm breath tickling my skin. “Everything I do is for you, Faith. You’re my world.”
I turned my face to his and kissed him, feeling the warmth surge in his perfect lips. But the kiss wasn’t as sweet as I expected. A bitter, frightened feeling bloomed in my heart as I contemplated that this might be our last kiss, our last night together. Lucas could die tomorrow night, and the cruel reality of it hit me hard. I kissed him eagerly, arching my body closer to his, wishing I could melt right into him.
He kissed me back more fiercely, urgently, as though he too thought this might be our last one. His hands touched me everywhere—the hollow above my collarbone, across my stomach, down over my hips, my thigh, pulling my leg around his waist. I knew we both wanted the same thing, but that it would never happen. In a few moments he would pull back, tell me he loved me, and kiss my forehead.
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